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Lawmaker Denies Effort for Lobbyists

Representative Jane Harman, shown with Representative Jim Costa in December 2007, asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to release unedited transcripts of her taped conversations.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Representative Jane Harman said Tuesday that she had not contacted the White House or any other agency about an investigation of two pro-Israeli lobbyists, and she asked the Justice Department to release without deletions any transcripts of conversations in which she was secretly recorded by government surveillance systems.

Ms. Harman, Democrat of California, was seeking to counter news reports that she had been overheard on a government wiretap agreeing to help seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for the two lobbyists in exchange for support for her bid to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Ms. Harman wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that she was outraged to learn from press reports that government agents “secretly wiretapped my conversations in 2005 or 2006 while I was ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.” Ms. Harman added, “I call on your department to release all transcripts and other investigative material involving me in an unredacted form.”

The Justice Department had no comment other than to say they were studying Ms. Harman’s letter to Mr. Holder.

The full disclosure that Ms. Harman has called for may not be easy or even feasible. The reports of her conversation, first in CQ and then The New York Times, said she was recorded because she was speaking with someone who was the subject of an authorized wiretap. One former government official who insisted on anonymity said Ms. Harman was picked up as a “collateral collection” to the target, meaning that Ms. Harman was not the subject of the eavesdropping but the other party was.

Stewart Baker, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson, said a person could not simply demand that wiretap transcripts be disclosed because that person was involved. Mr. Baker, who was a senior lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the government was not obliged to acknowledge who might have been wiretapped and that the other party had privacy rights. “Someone can’t simply waive the government’s interest in keeping secret national security matters, and they can’t waive the target’s interest in privacy,” he said.

Ms. Harman’s office issued a statement on Monday saying she had never contacted the Justice Department about its investigation of the lobbyists. On Tuesday, in television interviews and a written statement, Ms. Harman went further, denying that she had intervened with anyone in the Bush administration, including the Justice Department and the White House, on behalf of anyone under investigation.

Current and former government officials told CQ and The Times that Ms. Harman was recorded telling a caller in 2004 or 2005 that she would try to accede to his request to intervene with the Bush administration to help two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The two, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were being investigated for disclosing secrets.

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The officials said that in exchange for her help, the unnamed caller would have a major Democratic donor, Haim Saban, lean on Nancy Pelosi, who was to become House speaker after the 2006 election, to name Ms. Harman to head the Intelligence Committee. She was not named to the post.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were eventually charged under the World War I-era Espionage Act for sharing with journalists, colleagues and Israeli diplomats information they had received from Bush administration policymakers.

After many delays, they are scheduled to go to trial in June in Alexandria, Va. The prosecution has had several setbacks, and the case is widely viewed as a problem child for the Justice Department.

Senior Justice Department officials are involved in a final review of whether to go ahead with the case or have the charges dismissed, The Washington Post reported on its Web site on Tuesday.

The prosecutors lost a significant battle over whom the defense may call as witnesses to demonstrate the information sharing. Over the strong objections of the Justice Department, the judge in the case ruled that the defense may call Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, Stephen J. Hadley, the former White House national security adviser, and several other senior Bush administration foreign policy officials.

David H. Laufman, who was not involved in the Aipac case but served as a national security prosecutor, said the Rosen and Weissman prosecution “has presented a major dilemma for the department because of the rulings from the district court about the need to disclose more and more information to the defense.”

He added that “it’s fair to say none of the prosecutors on this case in their worst nightmare ever dreamed they would be engaged in hand-to-hand combat” for two years over what classified items could be disclosed.